This compound noun means ‘preparing the ground.’
As you will know it began in the world of cricket, where it is the responsibility of the groundskeeper to prepare the ground for a match—especially an important match, such as a test match.
Part of this preparation involves trundling a roller—a massive cylindrical weight—back and forth, evening out the bumps, and compacting the grass to give the bowlers the best bounce.
But now this notion of ‘preparing the ground’ has been borrowed by politicians (and their spin doctors) to name the kind of work they do to keep the poor old voters quiet and passive while the government does something unpleasant.
It works like this.
The government has something nasty to announce.
But they don’t just dump the news and then cop the howls of abuse that follow.
Instead, they ‘prepare the ground’—they have their spin doctors and media team do a bit of ‘pitch-rolling’ first.
Let’s image the government wants to raise taxes (doesn’t take a lot of imagination, does it?)
Knowing the cries of pain this will call forth from ordinary voters they start by doing some ‘pitch-rolling’ (preparing the ground).
They leak stories about deficits and the ‘need for balance’ to friendly journalists, they hint at what they are thinking of (to see if there is any immediate reaction) and they carefully avoid making any commitments about what they about to do (‘at this time we have no intention to …’)
Only when people have got used to the idea that this unpleasantness of a tax increase is coming and can’t be dodged (when the ‘ground is prepared’) is the change actually, formally announced.
And they get away with it because of all the ‘pitch-rolling’ that has already been done.
(E.g. if there are enough weeks of rumbling about changes to the Capital Gains Tax then you can get away with announcing the changes because you have smoothed out the ground first—by doing some ‘pitch-rolling.’)
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